


Daylight Could Be Violent

by MazzySE37



Series: Bright Blue Eyes [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Post CA:TWS, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, The Author Regrets Nothing, lots of exposition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 11:34:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7506706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MazzySE37/pseuds/MazzySE37
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve has called Natasha to see if she can help him figure out what he's going to do with the unconscious Winter Soldier in his bedroom. What he isn't expecting is the confession she gives him and it rocks his world of what he thought he knew about the spy. Angry and resentful that she lied to him, they debate what to do with James Barnes and how they are going to get help for him.</p><p>If only it were as easy as just talking about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daylight Could Be Violent

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting half written on my hard drive for a long time. I should have finished it forever ago, but I kind of forgot about it. Now that I went in and saw that it was so close to being done I figured that I should go ahead and just finish it. I don't think it's quite as dramatic as the previous two one-shots, but it was about time that I just went ahead and posted it on up. The way I see it, you guys could enjoy this now that it's up.
> 
> Hope you all like it!

It seemed like an eternity had passed since Steve had called Natasha. Bucky was sleeping in the other room and it was taking every bit of his self-control to not sit by his best friend’s bedside. He wanted nothing more than to be in that room, to make sure that Bucky slept soundly. He needed to know that he wasn’t going to disappear into thin air. As much as he knew this was the reality, he was absolutely terrified that he was going to wake up and would find his best friend still dead. If all of this had been nothing more than a dream, than how he was he going to reconcile what had happened? Now that he had his friend back, he couldn’t imagine going back to believing that he was dead.

That would be too painful.

There wasn’t even a knock on the door when Natasha all but seemingly showed up in the foyer. Steve glanced up in time to see her shrug out of her jacket and hung it up and crossed the room over to him, her eyes surveying it all. Everything more or less seemed normal aside from the broken items around the living room from his struggle with Bucky. Natasha was the one person that he trusted when it came to Bucky. After all, she had more than proven herself to be worthy of that trust.

“Where is he?” She demanded, never being one to beat around the bush when it came to serious matters.

Steve motioned towards the bedroom and for a second he thought that she was going to go into that room. He had no idea how well Bucky would take to seeing someone else that wasn’t him. Hell, he’d barely been able to convince the man to not kill him. He didn’t want to have Natasha risk her life just because she apparently had some sort of personal stake in all of this. He wasn’t going to pry just yet, but he needed some answers. He had heard how desperate she’d been on the phone with him.

“All right. How long has he been asleep now?” Natasha asked as she headed into the kitchen as if she was perfectly at home in his apartment.

Steve stood and glanced at the clock, “About six hours, if that. It’s barely ten in the morning. Where were you that you were able to get here so quickly?”

Natasha shot him a look that told him he shouldn’t be asking that question. She trusted him and she considered him one of her closest friends barring Clint, but there were still a few secrets that she wasn’t quite ready to give up to a man that was notorious for being very outspoken on his beliefs. If he knew exactly what she had been up to, she doubted he would approve.

“Let’s just say that I wasn’t all that far away and leave it at that,” she grabbed a beer from the fridge and wandered back over to where he was standing and all but motioned for him to sit down. They needed to have a talk and this was going to be very important. They needed to discuss how they were going to go forward.

Steve took a seat again and sat there in an awkward silence. He had so many questions and his gaze kept going back to the door. He just needed for this to be real. He needed for Bucky to really be alive. He’d been blaming himself for so long over what had happened. And now that he knew that his friend hadn’t actually died, a part of him felt even guiltier. While he was alive, he now knew what Bucky had been forced to live through for the last several decades. He had been used and abused. He’d been forced to become a killer and he knew that while Buck didn’t exactly know who he was anymore, the old Bucky Barnes would have never wanted to be like this. He had killed in the war because it was just that, it had been war. Being an assassin was something else entirely.

“Look, Steve, I know you have a lot of questions and I’m willing to answer them. I just need you to trust me. There are things that you don’t know about me. Or him,” she said as she glanced at the door to the bedroom.

Steve’s attention was piqued and his brows furrowed, “What do you mean? All of your files were dumped online with the rest of the SHIELD database.”

There was a rueful smile on her face that told him that he was very wrong.

“Not everything was released, Steve. There are certain parts of my life that have been lost, on paper files, at least. Red Room was very careful to not leave behind any real record of what they were doing. It would be too risky, especially after the collapse of the Soviets.”

He rubbed his forehead, “All right… look. Tasha, I just need some answers. What happened between you and Bucky? Why do you really care?”

She put the beer down that she’d been nursing in her hand for a while. There were things that she hadn’t told anyone with the exception of Clint, and even then sometimes she wasn’t always completely honest with him, and he was the closest thing she had to a best friend. Well, her relationship with Agent Barton was far more complicated than that. She loved him, of that much she knew. She loved Clint Barton. But was she in love with him? She didn’t know. 

She’d told Loki that love was for children and she did believe that. The last time she had those three little words. The last time she’d said that she’d lost the love of her life. It wasn’t a mistake that she was willing to make again.

“First off, even without telling you everything, I need you to know that I still would have come. I would have come just as quickly because I know what he means to you. He’s the one part of your past that you still have and he’s your biggest regret. We all have people like that. I care about you.”

“Natash-“ Steve started to say.

“No. Stop. I won’t say this again, Steve. I care about you. You’re one of a few people that I trust my life with and the lives of those that I also care about. You’re a good man and you deserve to have some happiness in your life. And that’s why I’m going to tell you something that I’ve not told anyone, not even Clint,” she said.

That instantly brought a look of surprise on his face.

“I know. I know you think that I tell him everything, and you’d be right. Mostly. There are things about my life that no one knows about except the corpses in the ground and the man in the other room. I keep these things buried because the last time I let my feelings get the better of me, I lost the man I loved. Understand?”

Steve frowned heavily and he nodded. He was starting to take a guess at what was going on here, but he was going to let her continue on. This was something that he knew she needed to say on her terms and he couldn’t press too much. The fact that she was even willing to talk to him about this was amazing.

“The second thing I need to say is that I knew I should have told you sooner, but again, I’ve had my reservations about telling anyone this. You can get angry at me if you want, but you need to let me finish.”

He solemnly nodded.

Natasha took a breath and steeled herself. These were feelings that she had been shutting out for decades. She had experienced so much joy and love with James Barnes, but she also had faced so much pain because of him. It wasn’t his fault, but their relationship hadn’t been approved of. They probably should have known better, considering the forces at play. They wouldn’t have even known one another if it hadn’t been for the Red Room and HYDRA having a sort of collaboration. They had never trusted one another, but there had been times when they had cooperated to each other’s benefits. That was exactly how she and Bucky had first met.

“My first confession is that I’m not quite the same age as is listed in my SHIELD file. I’m actually quite a bit older than that. I know, you’ve got a lot of questions about that. The Russians were so desperate to have a version of you that they didn’t stop ever working on a serum similar to what Erskine developed. Granted what the Russians concocted wasn’t quite as… elegant as his. But it worked well enough and I now age at a much slower pace.

“I had really just received the serum when they brought in the Winter Soldier to train me. And no, at the time I was not aware of who he was or who he was to you. You had been dead for years by that point and I never made the connection of who he was until much later. They never called him Bucky or even Barnes. The only name I was told was James. He trained me, taught me basically everything I know. HYDRA and the Red Room didn’t expect anything to happen, but we fell in love. We tried to keep it quiet for as long as we could, but they found out eventually. I never saw him again after that until the SHIELD mission a few years ago. HYDRA dragged him away and I have no doubts that they wiped him and froze him again.”

Steve listened surprisingly calmly at first, but as she continued on he started feeling angry. She had known Bucky was alive the whole time. She’d known and had never said a word. He forced himself to his feet and started to pace, trying not to let the anger show on his face. He had trusted Natasha and now that he knew she had been hiding something as serious as this from him, he couldn’t begin to think of what else she might have been hiding from him the entire time that they had been working together.

“Steve-“

“No!” Steve shouted suddenly, and he turned to face her with a fire burning in his eyes, “I trusted you. I gave you the kind of trust that you probably don’t deserve, given your background. You knew he was alive and you never said a damn thing. I’ve never asked you for much, Natasha. But this is one thing that you should have told me. I deserved to know that my best friend was alive. I beat myself up over this. I blamed myself for his death.”

Her reaction caught him off guard. Suddenly he realized just how tired she looked.

She smiled grimly and said, “I know. I connected the dots shortly after you came out of the ice. I never thought much about it until then, about who he was before I knew him. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, Steve. I should have told you. I know that. But that’s in the past and right now I just want to help you get him back. It’s probably too late for me to rebuild what I had with him. Too much has happened to him. But there is hope for you to get your best friend back.”

That burning anger he’d been feeling a moment ago deflated, even if minutely. He knew that as angry as he was, he was no longer alone in his desire to see his best friend saved, to become the man that he’d once been. He wasn’t entirely confident that Bucky would ever be quite the same. Too much had happened and while he wished for that more than anything, at this point he would just be happy with Bucky no longer wanting him dead. That would certainly be a huge improvement over their last few encounters.

“I know you’re angry at me, Steve, but right now our main focus is to help James, “ Natasha said as she held Steve’s gaze, her green eyes hard with some unknown emotion.

As much as he didn’t want to admit it, she was right. He would have plenty of opportunities to be angry about all of this later after they had figured out a way to save Bucky’s mind. Until then, they had bigger stuff to worry about. See, this was where the big dilemma came from. Neither one of them were experts on the brain and while Bucky was slowly coming out of the programming, he was highly unstable and unpredictable until they found a way to restore his memories without sending him into shock. He couldn’t think of anyone off of the top of his head that was smart enough to do it aside from Banner and Stark, and Bruce had taken off shortly after the New York Incident.

And Stark? Oh hell no. Steve was definitely not going to trust his best friend to that bastard, even if Steve’s own opinions of Tony had changed a little bit after the genius had nearly died in the process of saving the world.

Finally, he asked the question that had been burning in his mind the last few minutes, “How the hell are we going to save him, Tasha? He can barely remember his name, let alone the war and our friendship. He didn’t mention you, so it’s possible he doesn’t even remember you.”

Her expression began somber, “HYDRA was nothing if not methodical with him. They weren’t going to take the chance that he might remember you or me. If he had, that could possibly break the control they had over him.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Stark,” she said simply.

He bristled at that suggestion, “Hell no. I don’t trust Tony, not enough to have him go poking around in Bucky’s head.”

“And if we don’t have another choice? Steve, you can’t afford to be picky about this. Tony is an arrogant prick and I know that better than you do. I’m the one that had to fill out a report on him for SHIELD. But we both know he’s the only person that we can trust to do this. You might not like him that much, but generally, he knows what he’s doing,” She sounded sincere and Steve knew that she believed that this was the best course of action.

How could he agree to something like this, though? He had been through the pain of watching his best friend die and when he had found out that he wasn’t actually dead, the truth was so much worse than he could possibly have imagined. He was being asked to let one of the most arrogant and selfish people on the planet to start digging around in Bucky’s head. He lifted his hands and ran them down his face. His anger was starting to ebb away. He didn’t have the heart right now to keep arguing with her. It wasn’t going to do either one of them any good because, at the end of the day, Natasha had a point. Tony was one of the only people that could do it and the man was a super genius. He would find a way to fix his best friend.

“So how do we do this then?” He finally asked.

Natasha put down the bottle of beer and she stood up. She walked over and put a hand on his shoulder, “I’m going to call Stark. You are going to go and make sure that Bucky is still in your bedroom. Don’t wake him up yet, though. He might get spooked if you do.”

Steve sighed heavily and nodded his head, watching her pull out her phone and excused herself to the other room. The apartment suddenly felt far colder than it had before. Taking her suggestion to heart, the super soldier got up from his seat and walked over to the bedroom door and opened it as quietly as he could, just in case it woke up the assassin. He peeked inside and when he noticed that there was no one in bed, his heart seized.

“Shit. Bucky!” He stepped into the room and looked around as quickly as could.

The bedroom window had been opened up. The only theory he could think of was that he had snuck out while he had thought he was asleep. How hadn’t he noticed? Steve sank down onto the bed and the weight of the world hit him like a ton of bricks.

He’d just lost his best friend for the second time.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't decided yet whether or not I want this to be added as canon to the Ready Aim Fire series. Speaking of which, I have the first official chapter of the story written. Just gotta type it up and post it on here. c:


End file.
